[bamboozled]

It's fun, until you live there, and find yourself forever filling out tens of useless forms and workout that pretty much everything requires a form, whether or not it makes sense.

Don't get me wrong, I think the art work, Kanji and calligraphy is awesome, there are many amazing things about the 'paper culture' but, there are many drawbacks, especially in 2021 when the rest of the world has gone digital in so many areas.

[davgoldin]

I'd put cleaning the mailbox in second place behind filling forms. They get filled up daily with flyers and paper ads of all kinds. It's so bad that most buildings have a dedicated trash can, just for these. Right next to the mailbox area.

[moogleii]

To be fair, my last apartment in NYC was like that. Convenient trashcan right in the mailbox room. Though I suppose my mailbox didn't literally get filled daily. If that's the case in Japan, that's pretty bad.

[bmitc]

This drives me crazy. Greater than 90% of our mail is junk mail and goes straight into the recycling bin. I was watching some recycling process videos the other day, and when it came to bailing up the sorted paper, it looked like it was basically all junk mailers. We literally have systems that supply time and money to design the mailers, supply ink and paper and probably some plastic to make them, mail them, pass them around in the mail system, deliver them, then they're promptly thrown away or recycled, then they're carted off to be processed, and then the mailers eventually end up in landfills or partly recycled. It's insane. It's a closed system that does literally nothing but expend resources and output emissions.

I wish the government would make it illegal to mail advertising mailers. But then the USPS, which has had funding purposely cut by those who want their privately held investments to win out in the postal game or just hate anything that is available for everyone, probably relies on a lot of the revenue that comes from those mailers. So it continues.

I've found it's basically impossible to get rid of receiving them.

[Freak_NL]

In the Netherlands we have stickers you can stick on your letter box that stop 99% of unaddressed spam from being put in. The sender can get into trouble with the regulator if they don't adhere to this system.

It works really well (it has existed for decades), and many municipalities are now moving towards making this 'no sticker' the default! This means that if you want flyers, you have to put up a 'yes sticker' instead of having none, and without a sticker you won't get any. This opt-in approach has quite an impact on the amount of useless paper pushed around.

[resonious]

This actually works in Japan too. I'm not sure if there are regulators who have your back here but I've been using a "no spam" sticker to pretty good effect.

[kmonsen]

We had that in Norway too.

We don't have that in the US since it's part of the business model of the postal office or USPS to deliver ads in your mail box.

[Ma8ee]

At least in Sweden those stickers only stop the unaddressed leaflets or catalogs they put in the mailbox. If someone printed your name and address on it, the junk will still be delivered.

[Rd6n6]

That’s not a paper issue, that’s a legal issue. It should be illegal to blanket somebody with unsolicited spam

[buttercakes]

Print out form. Fill out form. Bring it to old man in an office to stamp form. Scan form. Email form.

[bamboozled]

Disappointed you forgot the faxing.

[charlieyu1]

And the Japanese businesses use Excel so much. They use it to make digital forms, make each cell a square, then fill it with one character per cell.

[myrandomcomment]

The need to fax a form is just a giant “I am sorry, what?” The answer after a bit of back and forth and pushing (which to be fair is un-Japanese of me, even rude) is almost always 仕方がない which is a very fatalistic term meaning “it cannot be helped”. I thought it was cool to be a Gaijin have a Kanji version of my name (carefully argued over and by close friends to convey the right meaning) with the associated 判子 (hanko) stamp (a name stamp you can use for forms), but now I know better. Japan is so well organized. I love the rhythm of the subway, the perfection of the trains, the absolute cleanliness of it all; the flaw exposed by the ham fisted response to vaccination that done properly should have been sorted at every “konboni” (convenience store). Oh well. Still an amazing place full of wonderful people.